1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns information lifecycle management.
2. Related Art
Large quantities of information pose new management challenges to enterprises, particularly with regard to business goals such as cost, performance, reliability, and availability. Recent regulatory requirements, e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and DOD, which mandate corporations to maintain fixed-content reference data safely for years, impose additional complexity on information management.
Referring now to FIG. 1, a typical prior art Information Lifecycle Management (“ILM”) system 100 is depicted. System 100 includes a stack of storage hardware and software layers, including storage devices 102, such as magnetic disk and WORM optical disk or tape; storage software 104 providing record repository functions; middleware 106 providing content management functions, including software such as Documentum, DB2, Content Management (“CM”) and Information Record Manager (“IRM”); applications 106, such as e-mail and Lotus Notes and medical imaging; and high level applications 108, such as SAP and WebSphere Business Integrator (WBI). These layers of system 100 work together as a whole to deliver key business functions, such as analyst report processing, to meet business goals. Unfortunately, existing ILM systems manage information based primarily on usage frequency, age, and data types, with the result that such systems tend to be untrustworthy, hard to manage, and poorly integrated. Consequently, a need exists for improvements in computer systems for storing large amounts of information, including systems such as depicted in FIG. 1.